Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy: Exploring Reason and Morality
Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy
The Starry Heavens Above and the Moral Law Within
“Two things fill the mind with admiration and respect, the more often and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
These words encapsulate Kant’s reflection, which implicitly raises the question of the instrument of reflection: reason. In grappling with fundamental questions about what we can know and what we ought to do, Kant tirelessly sought consistent answers. He questioned reason’s nature and its capacity to find objectively valid answers, as demanded by science. He also pondered the value of contemplating issues beyond our grasp (metaphysics) and the nature of statements we make about them.
Kant’s Approach to Philosophy
For Kant, philosophy is primarily the self-employment of reason—an ongoing process rather than a finished product. He contrasted this view with academic philosophy, which he saw as full of conflicting answers to the same problems.
Three Fundamental Questions
Kant’s philosophy revolves around three fundamental questions:
- What can I know? This involves examining the structure and limits of reason to determine whether metaphysics is possible as a science, like math and physics. Kant addresses this primarily in the Critique of Pure Reason.
- What should I do? Kant’s metaphysics forms the foundation of his morality, based on the nature of practical reason, its requirement of universality (expressed through duty), and the subjective need to postulate liberty, the soul, and God. Key works include the Critique of Practical Reason and Metaphysics of Morals.
- What may I hope? This question encompasses not only the rational faith arising from metaphysics but also religion, which Kant justifies not as objective knowledge but as a consistent relationship between the concept of God and the fulfillment of duty. This is explored in Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason.
These three questions culminate in the overarching question: What is man?
What Can I Know? (Critique of Pure Reason)
Kant undertakes a transcendental analysis of reason—an examination of the principles within reason that make knowledge possible. His solution, transcendental idealism, posits that these principles are ideal (formal) but lack content.
A) The Copernican Revolution
Initially a rationalist following his teacher, Kant drew inspiration from Leibniz for what he termed the “Copernican Revolution.” This shift occurred when he realized that in science, reason constructs objectivity. When we know, it’s not information shaping our understanding, but our understanding shaping what we receive. Kant argued that the objectivity of the scientific object is constructed from the subjectivity of the knowing subject (the transcendental subject).
- Transcendental refers to the pre-empirical structure (a priori), prior to any experience, that validates universal and necessary thought.
- The subject is not a soul or substance but the thinking subject—the logical subject of reason upon which structuring principles rest.
- Reason is dynamic, employing a priori categories (elements of the pre-empirical structure) that are contentless and functional. These categories shape and unify content provided by experience (in science) or by reason’s universal and necessary form (in morality).
B) The Role of Experience
Hume’s empiricism awakened Kant from his “dogmatic slumber,” highlighting the necessity of experience and its limits for scientific knowledge. However, unlike empiricists, Kant believed that knowledge, not experience, sets the conditions for scientific knowledge, giving order and objectivity to experience through a priori elements.
Judgments in Science
Kant’s analysis of scientific judgments differs from both rationalist and empiricist views.
Classifying Judgments:
By Source:
- A Priori: Independent of experience, universal, and necessary.
- A Posteriori: Derived from experience.
By Truth Foundation:
- Analytic: The predicate is contained within the subject, providing no new knowledge.
- Synthetic: The predicate adds new knowledge to the subject.
Kant criticized rationalists for relying on a priori analytic judgments (universal and necessary but not adding knowledge) and empiricists for relying on synthetic a posteriori judgments (adding knowledge but lacking universality and necessity).
He proposed synthetic a priori judgments, which add knowledge while being universal and necessary, like Newton’s physics.
The Critique of Pure Reason: Three Parts
Kant analyzes the types of judgments characteristic of science, tracing the process of knowledge from sensation to its highest level. Each level corresponds to a part of the Critique of Pure Reason.
A) Transcendental Aesthetic
Studied the conditions of possibility of sensitivity. That is, as sensible capacity of reason makes possible and lays the foundations of objective knowledge through perception.
Sensitivity is a passive and receptive power that shapes the content (matter) that are presented from the senses.
The origin of the contents of knowledge is in the noumenon, which is reality itself. This is unknowable as it is, but it supplies sensation, sensitive insights to be received in the structure sensitive to acquire an objective priori.
A priori structure of sensibility are the pure intuitions of space and time. There are concepts (active or not judgmental directly from them) and have content. Are cognitive ability with the pure form of space and time, without content, which serve to shape space (geometric) and temporal (arithmetic) to the sensations they receive.
For Kant, space and time with which to build the geometry and arithmetic, are not external to us (to Newton) nor a relation between objects (as in Leibniz) is the condition that there are objects of geometry and arithmetic.
Space gives way to feelings that comes from the external sensitivity according to their position in it (the external senses) and unifies forming geometric objects. It is therefore the foundation of geometry.
Time shapes the feelings that come from the inner sensitivity, according to a before and after ordering the continuation of those feelings. It is the foundation of arithmetic.
So pure intuitions are sensitive to form events. These are not reality itself (noumena) but the content objectives (universal and necessary because of the way a priori of space and time in which they are located) in which science is based.
TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC
It is the next step, which studies the conditions of possibility of understanding that has allowed to form judgments of physics and of science in general.
Kant understands the understanding and the active faculty of uniting the phenomena by rules. Through it we managed to develop objective judgments.
The a priori structure of understandingwhich allows the formation of the Regas are pure concepts or categories. These are a priori, active and serve to shape the phenomena that are of sensible intuitions.
For Kant, the categories without intuitions are empty (have nothing to unify) and intuitions without categories are blind. (Without scientific judgments, the phenomena of geometric and arithmetic can not be explained).
Kan will explore understanding through transcendental logic (remember the meaning that we have seen) which is the method of finding a priori structure of elements that shape scientific judgments by which relate phenomena.
The first task of transcendental logic is to derive the categories. This makes analyzing the types of judgments that are used in science (synthetic a priori). He concludes that there are 12 guys who are ranked 3 in 3 (according to quantity, quality, relation and modality) of each type of trial draws a category (transcendental deduction). Thus, for example trials Universal (sets where all elements have a property. For example. All triangles have three sides) removes the entire category. Without this category could not make universal judgments objectives.
The second task of logic is to analyze how are you linking categories from the phenomena of sensible intuitions. For this union legitimate scientific judgments. The categories or pure concepts to shape the events build empirical concepts, which have their origin in the experience and may not be exceeded (the subject are sensible intuitions), but should its universal form and necessary objectivity, the categories .
The place where they join the categories and sensible intuitions is the transcendental schema.
Thus, the subject categories established by laws and orders the world’s knowledge to be objective knowledge. But always order without departing constructs the subject of possible experience. You can not give up the matter provided by sensibility.
Transcendental Dialectic
Once given the a priori structure of knowledge and that makes objective judgments in shaping the material that gives you the experience possible. Kant’s Metaphysics asks whether it can be a science. This continues to examine the rational capacity of man in its highest level. Pure Reason.
Reason is the power to unify under the terms of universality and necessity. By its very nature tends to always seek greater unity of knowledge. This is how ideas come to the unconditional (not conditioned by pure intuition or categories). Ideas are turned into categories with content, ending last units from their own nature, without recourse to experience.
ideas that arise are three:
1 -The idea of the soul or self as a substance as a unit last of all internal and external experience. According to Kant to present this idea and objective is to commit a paralogism, that is, moving the transcendental subject, which is a logical deduction to support the knowledge, the idea of a substance behind it. Is to make the category of substance, which is a function, an idea with content apart from the experience.
2 – The idea of the world as unconditioned ultimate unity of relations between phenomena. If we try to defend it as an objective knowledge went into antinomies (consistent demonstrations of contradictory positions) “These contradictions are because if you miss one of the phenomenal to the noumenal ( For example, in the third antinomy in the world says that everything happens according to a deterministic causal chain, without room for free) or from the noumenal in the phenomenal (events happening in the world that have cause an assertion libre.Es lies outside the scope of possible experience).
3 – The concept of God as the ultimate unit of unconditioned causality. Criticizes the arguments that try to prove the existence of God because the rationalist or idealist, like that of Descartes or San Anselmo, make more of an idea with infinite objective content . The existence is a category to apply to what comes from the experience. Not an idea with content.
He also criticizes the retrospective or cosmological arguments, such as Thomas Aquinas routes, because they turn cause more of an idea with content based on an illegal step from the experience to make a statement about something outside of it.
Thus, in these matters, if we use the understanding to resolve our mistake, we can not reduce what nuoménico (where thinking takes place on them) to the phenomenal (what we think in a scientific way at the level of understanding).
If we use pure reason to address them, no purpose, then we are going outside the framework of possible experience, where the categories are applied to build scientific judgments.
These ideas are, according to Kant, transcendental illusions. Attempts to convert the drive to give the categories and the universality of reason in content ideas.
But that does not mean that these ideas do not have a transcendent and regulatory validity. Are beyond the experience (transcendental) but make human knowledge progresses increasingly seeking unity and universal theories. Unit Ideal for science.
WHAT SHOULD I DO?
In this second inquiry raises the question of how reason governs human action and is where the Metaphysics, as a result of the need for reason, acquires its full meaning.
Only one thing is good, good will. This is the point of entry and of the ethics of Kant. Goodwill isfree obedience to the moral law that lies within me. What is the foundation of law and its mandate, according to Kant?
The answer is found in the same ratio. As we saw in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Aesthetic and Analytic transcendental reason in its lower levels unifying the content that gave him the experience to build from objectivity.
But, as we saw in the Transcendental Dialectic. Always tends to unity. This unit corresponds with what the express, Universality (which applies to everyone at all times) and the need (so needed).
Reason itself is considered a pure form without any content. This universal and necessary form of reason becomes the guide Ethics in the will, since she becomes law.
A law is always followed would be a maximum and will always be a willingness to follow Santa.
But we clearly see in us that we always follow what reason tells us. That is why the law is presented as an imperative.
Kant classifies constraints using the tables of categories of form derived in the Transcendental Analytic. Ie in the ways he is right to guide the will. 2 are the types to which is fixed:
Hypothetically, are those that involve a condition. And are expressed with phrases like “yes. then. ” For example. “If you are virtuous, you will attain happiness.” “If you get up early you’ll be on time.”
In this kind of imperative, as Kant ethics are based materials, heteronomous because for them the good is not the will, but what you will get if it meets conditions (to be virtuous, the pursuit of pleasure, etc …) which are imposed from outside (by external standards or passions raised from the outside or from all aquiello is not reason itself). These ethical concerns are conditional and therefore are useful only if given the condition. Their laws are not universal or necessary.
- Categorical. That requirement has not provided any, is unconditional. And the only thing is the pure unconditional, universal and necessary part of Practical Reason. If our actions are guided by this pure form (The reason it becomes law) then we have to guide our action autonomy (which is our reason leads us, without any external element) and the universality and necessity that the action Ethics, freedom and responsibility required.
Kant made this imperative mainly as follows: “work only as a maximum so that you can at the same time it becomes universal law”
A different formulation of it is: “Act in such a way that you use humanity, whether in your person as in the person of another, always as an end and never as a means.” In the second formulation of Kant presents every man, subject of reason as an end in itself, for in the law is universal and necessary to be respected in all our actions, so man is always an end in itself.
The relationship between the will and the categorical imperative is the duty. Kant’s morality is the morality of duty.
The feeling that inspires the line of duty, while that it is respect for the law.
Thus Kant presents his Ethics and formal (The shape of the reason within each becomes law, the same for all, since reason is universal and necessary) and autonomous (each one is given the law to itself).
However, the Ethics, although based on a universal and necessary law arises from the requirement subjective reason, it becomes law. And with this demand subjective reappears 3 last great ideas or units of reason. God, freedom and the soul, which becomes ethical postulates, ie, thoughts that are not objective but are subjectively necessary for human action can be thought of and gain consistency.
- Freedom is required by reason as the foundation of all ethics. Goodwill is the freely choosing to follow the categorical imperative. Without freedom human actions would fall within the causal chains of the phenomenal world, mechanical and deterministic.
- The immortal soul is a requirement of reason to combine the duty and happiness, they fulfill the duty in this life always seems to follow happiness.
The postulate of God is because it combines the ideals of correspondence between the goodwill, happiness and the highest recognition to duty.